Day 2 of LBL

Second day of living on just $2.25 a day for food.

Since I had the same breakfast as before, it was a bit of a waste of time to write it all over again.... and I'm lazy.

So lunch!

French onion Soup!

Ingredients
2 onions
water
1 slice of bread

Now this is freaking tasty as and as you can see, you really don't need much to make it.
Slice onions in long thin pieces and sweat them. Seating means that you kinda steam them. you want it to be limp. (this is sounding quite sexual isn't it.....) And it takes ageeessss...like an hour on real low...Then add water, now to pimp it up, instead of water add chicken stock. 'Cos that shit is good.
croutons are just chopped up bread fried. Want a bit more flavour? Add Garlic, and be generous, 'cos you can never use too much garlic!

Then, boom. SOUP!!!

Dinner:

Had a shared dinner with friends of my parentals.
Rod and Sylvia are in their 70's but still wanted to do the "Live Below the Line" for Oxfam, (Go team them!) so they invited us up to their place to share a Moroccan themed dinner.
Sylvia made a very delicious tagine made up of rice, fruit, nuts and her own free range chicken eggs! Spicy and Oh So Colourful!!! Did I mention Delicious!
Since we didn't make the tagine I don't have the recipe, but we made the pita, couscous and yoghurts.
So lets inform your brain how to make these simple, filling, cheap sides! 

First, the Pita Breads,

2 Cups plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup warm water
3tbs oil
10g yeast ( If you use Edmonds Surebake ...that's about 2tsp)

Put about a quarter of flour into a large bowl, add yeast, salt and warm water.
(If you stick your finger into the water...it should not fell hot...or cold to touch!)

Mix well, and leave for about 15 mins or until you see bubbles forming on the top of mixture. (IT'S ALIVE!!!)
Add rest of flour and oil, and mix into moist sticky dough. Roll out onto floured table and knead until it's springy and elastic to touch....about 5 to 10 mins.
Oil the bowl, and place dough back into it...rolling so lightly oiled. Leave in warm place for hour or so...
Remove from bowl, and divide into 10 pieces. Roll out into circles, and leave on bench for 10 mins, then turn, and leave for another 10 mins...this makes them "pop" up a bit.
You can fry in pan or bake at 200oC for 10 mins turning after 5mins for a crisper finish.
I know this sounds long...but you can do other stuff in between the mixing, that's multitasking baby!

Couscous

1 Cup instant couscous
2 Cups boiling water
1 TBS oil
(to be fair, you could just read the instructions on the packet... that would be easiest.)

Boil that water in a saucepan, add that sexy oil.
Stir in couscous, then take off heat.
put tight lid on and leave for 5 min. We added tons of chopped parsley and the rind and juice of a fresh lemon.

And that all there is to it! Instant Couscous really is the way to go... its not pricy at all!

We also had some yoghurt. INVEST IN A YOHGURT MAKER! you can even find them at second hand shops.

So we used plain yoghurt and with one we added mint and the other garlic.

And there you have some sides to add with most meals! You could even get salad, meat and make your own Turkish Pita pocket!

Enjoy and good luck!!

Day one of LBL

Day one of living on $2.25.

 

Breakfast : Eggs on toast

Keeping it simple for breakfast, because you really can't go far wrong with eggs on toast.
One (cage free) egg which were on special, and two pieces of crappy cheap toast. As you can see the egg is cooked inside of the bread, I got this from V for Vendetta! Awesome movie.

Now if you want this to be pimped up, which I'm sure you do, use much nicer bread.
Butter said bread (like really, butter the crap out of it, you can never have to much butter!)
Use a glass to make a hole in the middle. - Hint, that's where the egg is planning to nestle. I used a heart shaped cookie cutter!
I like to fry the bread a bit before adding the egg so that it's got a bit more crunch.
Add egg to hole and season (I like adding parsley to eggs as well and salt and a shit load of pepper).

DON'T OVER COOK THE EGG!

There is nothing worse in this world than a rubbery egg in my mind. (Yes, I'm exaggerating.)

And boom! Tasty breakfast filled with protein and other good things, depending on the bread that tickles your fancy.

Lunch: Vegie soup

 

 

 

*Content sigh* Really, there is nothing that tastes like home more than Vegie Soup.
Ingredients: Mixed seasonal vegetables, this for instance has carrot, kumara (sweet potato) and pumpkin.
Lightly fry or roast (I roasted), in order to caramelise the vegies. This really brings the sweetness and also adds colour. ANY combination of vegetables can be used from just pumpkin or try leek and potato.
Add water and boil the crap out of it!
Pimped up version would have stock instead of water and tasty seasonings depending on what makes you the happiest.
I personally use shit loads of cracked black pepper!

Dinner :Mexican

 

 

Chilli Non Carne.

 

The vegetarian version

.

Ingredients

 

One cup dried red kidney beans

One tin tomatoes

One onion

1 tsp dried chilli flakes.

 

Frist (and this is really important) if you are using dried beans like I did (because they are freaking cheap), you MUST boil them in tons of water for at least 45 min until they are soft or "al dente"!

This is better if you have time to do it the night before.

If you use different types of bean, this is not so important, or you could cheat and just add a can of red kidney beans.

Fry onion, (pimped version would have mince as well) add chilli flakes, then add the drained beans.

Pour in can of tomatoes, cook until thick and dreamy.

Taste for seasoning.

 

This makes more than enough for four.

 

Tortillas

 

 

 

These were a big hit!!!

 

Ingredients

 

2 cups plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 cup water

3 TBS oil

 

In large bowl combine flour and salt, stir in water and oil, turn onto table and gently knead 10 or 12 times, until it feels amazing, add flour or water if needed.

Rest of 10 min (I guess your bread can rest too) then divide into 8 portions, roll into 15cm circles or near enough.

In a large frying pan (without oil) pop the tortillas in on medium heat for approx. 1 min per side, till brown and smelling like heaven. Serve with chilli non carne and yoghurt which you should make yourself and save shit loads (or sour cream for pimped up version)

 

 

I also had a wild watercress salad as a side.

When picking wild leaves, make sure they are not from fields that graze animals (liver fluke warning) or have been sprayed! Or you might get real sick and blame me, which would suck.

 

 

 

All these meals are cheap, tasty and god forbid, healthy! Yes people, cheap and healthy.

But, these meals do take up quite a bit of time and require effort.

 

Well good luck if you want to try out these recipes!

 

 

Live below the line 2013!

Could you live on just $2.25 a day?

1.4 billion people are forced to, $2.25 a day for everything. That's food, shelter, water etc..
That is what extreme poverty is, it's a concept that people like me, who are happily middle class, have a hard time to comprehend.

That's why, the awesome people of the Global Poverty Project started a campaign called Live Below the Line. It is to raise awareness about extreme poverty and to raise funds for those fighting against it.

So, as I'm sure you can guess, I took part this year.
The challenge was to live on just $2.25 per day on food for five days. It was just a brief glimpse of what it must be like to have so little food which equals little energy so on so forth.

I was lucky this year to have my epic mother who also took part (kind of), which means all the meals I had were, to put it bluntly, tasty as!

Now for how we priced it, we were a bit clever this year.

We calculated the costs by finding out on the Countdown website the price per kilo and then figuring out how much we used. Therefore two cups of flour (300g) worked out to be ......
$1.33 per kilo divided by 100g is $0.13.....times three .....= $0.39

This was an interesting exercise as we were surprised to find that yeast costs approximately $35 per kilo!!

This explains why quite so many cultures have unleavened breads (or flat breads).

I will be putting up the recipes of the meals I had up on this blog, so that everyone can enjoy a healthy cheap meal. We have also added extra ingredients if you want to pump it up a bit!

I hope you enjoy!